There Is No Such Thing As A Decent Republican In 2021 They Have Been On This Trajectory Since The 1950s.

I suppose I shouldn't complain about the internet service on my road being screwed up, there's a teacher on the road who's having to deal with that while teaching remotely.  She may have to go somewhere else to set up, all I have to do is grit my teeth as I'm prevented from doing online research for this pro-bono writing I attempt. 

Though I have found I'm still exhausted from the past year, maybe it's just as well that I haven't been writing thousand + word diatribes. 

In the little listening I have been doing through pirates of MSNBC, Chris Hayes raised one of the best issues I've seen raised in the last four years. It was riffing off of a quote from the Chamber of Commerce, Wall St. Republican Senator John Thune from one of the worst white supremacist states, South Dakota, he asked, 

"Do they want to be the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility, free markets, peace through strength and pro-life or do they want to the be party of conspiracy theories and QAnon?"

 

Chris Hayes, correctly, points out that no one, not even the Republican base wants that, which, due to it being tried and flopping, screwing the Republicans own rural racist base to the extent that Donald Trump hammered Jeb Bush to pieces in 2016, the Republican Party is, in fact and not idiotic "conservative theory" the party of white-supremacy and insurrection and is just fine with Marjorie Taylor Greene and QAnon, Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, etc. because they are motivated by their racism and their hatred and their largely whipped up media driven resentment in which they blame all the wrong people, exactly as the corporate media planned over the past sixty years. 

 

There are no decent Republicans in 2021. Not Liz Cheney, not Adam Kinzinger, not Lisa Murkowski or Mitt Romney. The last two got together with the disgusting fraud Susan Collins to try to destroy aid to the American People AID THAT, AS HAYES POINTS OUT IS EVEN POPULAR WITH SOME OF THE WORST REPUBLICANS BECAUSE THEY ARE DESPERATE. They may announce their disdain for the Taylor Greens, the Lauren Boeberts, maybe eventually even the Matt Gaetzs and others, but what they want is the flip side of a depraved party which is a danger to the United States. Mitt Romney has the distinction of having voted to remove Trump through conviction last year and he almost certainly will do that this year, the others not so much. 

 

As I noted recently as far back as the Republican Convention of 1964, the baseball hero Jackie Robinson was noting that the racists had taken over the Republican Party, the first one in which the white supremacists the Republicans took in as Democrats started passing civil rights for Black People and others into law, dominated the party.  His account from his memoir is worth reading and re-reading because everything that was obvious in this past election was already in place AND ON THE CONVENTION HALL FLOOR, PUT THEIR BY RACIST REPUBLICAN DELEGATES FIFTY-SIX YEARS AGO.  It was a trend that started even earlier, back in the 1940s when the Democrats really started making changes in light of the lessons from fighting Nazism.   

Anyone who is pretending that the Republican Party, a party that unites the money interests, the financier class, the increasingly tiny, flaky and work eaten stalwart Republican families that started out that way while Lincoln was still alive (hardly still extant in rural New England) and the Americanazis, the old line white supremacists, the more dangerous modern ones, often founded among the college credentialed and more amorally depraved and degenerate than the genteel racists of the Republican past.   I have had to recently point out to someone who bought his old PR that the posing elitist William F. Buckley was opposed to voting rights laws for the same reasons that today's Republicans sitting on the Supreme Court do, that Black People will vote. 

If You Will Insist

THE "new atheist" fad of the '00s wasn't really new, it was just a more superficial, TV era repeat of the old Brit style of atheism only without much if any reading or addressing anything, the leaders perhaps reviewing the writings of dear old Bertie Russell - at the high end, and what the American branch under Corliss Lamont, his alphabet soup of groups as managed by Paul Kurtz and his crappy "Prometheus" publishing company, the self discrediting CSICOP (now CSI to cover up its sTARBABY scandal) regurgitated from earlier atheists.   And that's the higher end of American-Britatheist invective.  The lower end such as was pushed by that old degenerate crook, Madalyn Murray O'Hare didn't seem to figure much in it, and she was the higher As Seen On TV end of that even lower level of old line Brit style atheism.  

I became quite a student of English language pop atheism and a little less of one in the atheist traditions of other languages over the past two decades.  I was, of course, as a typical college-educated American familiar with it, unreviewed, non-fact-checked.   I can say that of those I reviewed the most superficial was the Brit-American.  It never fact checks itself, stuff that was lied about in the 19th and 18th century is repeated and published as fact, though of every issue I looked into, none of them took long to refute.  Mostly that was the simplest, most basic matter of looking at the things cited by the atheists to see that in few if any cases did those books, articles, etc. say what they were claimed to say.  Some, such as the certainly spurious if not non-existent letters of Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine that the 19th century atheist propagandist Moncure D. Conway claimed to have read are still "cited" even though no one else seems to have ever seen them, their existence being otherwise unevidenced.   I suspect there may have been forged letters, made to sell to a rich atheist looking for such crap.  Only Conway doesn't seem to have bought them.  Or he may have just lied them into existence.  And that's only one small part of what I found when I looked for the primary documents claimed, cited and allegedly quoted.   Even the otherwise respectable atheist journalist or scholar seems to throw the most basic standards of honesty out the window when it comes to promoting their religious beliefs.  I would say as I did when I started going into that here, I couldn't care less what slaveholders like Jefferson and Madison said about Christianity, they didn't practice it.

This is all to say that the Britatheist who snarked about my piece about Thomas Aquinas never read it as she has never read a word of Aquinas.  She probably never even read something like ol' Bertie's typical Brit, anti-Catholic distortion of what he wrote, claiming that unlike that old phony Socrates, Aquinas always had a predetermined goal in his inquiry (as if Socrates ever questioned his own preferences, such as his Athenian ruling male elite snobbery.  I suspect old Bertie shared in it enough, translated to aristocratic Brit terms, so he never much noticed it permeates Socrates as Plato invented him.).  I think the Britatheist just knows that you're supposed to disdain Aquinas because he was, A. Catholic, B. not an English Catholic, C. Religious.  Her American buddies probably don't even know that much.  I wouldn't claim that current American atheists are stupider than the Brits are, just that the Brits have a more direct link to a tradition that invented the lies that get retold.

Thirty years ago I stupidly and ignorantly associated atheism with intellectualism, now I associate it with the opposite. Current atheism is a manifestation of anti-intellectualism at its most conceited.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Has The Protection Of "moderate" Republicans, All Republicans They Should Wear That Every Day

THE reason to show this is because it's a. Brian Tyler Cohen, as usual, makes good points and b. it shows the longest video of her more than merely implied threat against David Hogg, WHO WAS PUBLICLY ACKNOWLEDGED TO BE GETTING DEATH THREATS WHEN SHE DID THIS, having a crazy woman chasing him down the sidewalk as she was telling him she packs a gun with her.  What she did should be a felony, she shouldn't be allowed to own a gun, carry a gun, handle a gun under pain of being put in the booby hatch where she belongs.   Asa Hutchinson's refusal to support removing her from the Congress, the notable lack of Republicans supporting that clearly warranted move, especially considering her threats against members of the House and others, just shows that she is part of the mainstream of the Republican-fascist party, a party that she is a member of because they absorbed America's indigenous fascist class, the racist white supremacists.   It's going to be really telling if her clear antisemitism added to her racism doesn't get her thrown out just how dangerous the Republican-fascist party is.   It's not only pre-Civil Rights Amendment, it's back into the period of overt antisemitism. 

Hate Mail

 I don't care.  I'm done with all that crap.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Tony Schumacher - Fare

 

Just a normal night for a taxi driver. Hoping that the next fare will be easy and hassle free. But then a dodgy geezer and his girlfriend climb in. All attitude and matching nylon tracksuits, they pay him big money to drive around. And it turns out not to be a normal night after all. 

Cast: The Driver - Mark Womack 

Mikey - Mike Noble 

Leanne - Sade Malone 

The Kid - Sacha Parkinson 

Producer/Director - Gary Brown 

 

Kind of made me think of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Mystery Project, Midnight Cab though it's not really like that.  

What Do You Mean Gay Men Act That Way?

A number of weeks ago I came across a piece written by a gay man, a Catholic, who had decided to go from being a Christian who was in a relationship with another man, a relationship that included sexual relations, to not having sex with other people. I don't know anything much else about his life than what he said about it, I don't know how the man he was in relationship with felt about that. Anyone who chooses to not have sex with someone else as the right thing for them to do is entirely OK by me, as long as it is a matter of mutual agreement with someone they may have made prior commitments to.  

When he was giving his reasons as to why he not only chose that route for himself but was advocating it for others he said something that I can both understand and which I think oversimplifies a far more nuanced and difficult issue and which is hardly specific to gay men. He claimed that when he looked hard at the gay men he knew who were Christians, he saw little in their life choices and action that differentiated them from gay atheists or agnostics or those who called themselves "pagans" etc.

Now, I would be the first to agree that someone calling themself a Christian should lead to discernible differences in how you live your life. It is a requirement of real belief instead of mere baptized heathendom that you try to follow the Gospel, the Epistles, the Law and the Prophets. You should not lie, you should not break promises of fidelity, you should not act in ways that exploit people and endanger them, treating them like disposable objects but as representatives of God. That is especially those who by lesser strength, lesser intelligence, irrationality due to personality problems or through poverty and mere circumstance are vulnerable to those smarter, more rational, richer than they are. And certainly that includes those who are more physically powerful.

And anyone who has read much of what I have written will know that I have deeply criticized gay men, in particular, for what I assume is what this man meant by behavior which is consistent with atheism, agnosticism and "paganism". I would never go to a pride parade because from what I've seen in videos and pictures and read in articles, I can't agree with much of what I've seen celebrated in those. Treating people as sex objects, certainly high among those things, treating sadism, bondage, exploitation as acceptable lifestyle choices is an evil I have never supported and always rejected.

But my issue with what this newly chaste gay man says is that none of what he said is not as true of straight Christians, officially celibate Christians or those who are self-claimed practitioners of chastity. Straight men and women who are Catholics, married, unmarried, allegedly chaste, practice all of those sexual kinks and fetishes and practices, they break their promises, they commit adultery, they commit fornication in casual, uncommitted relationships probably in numbers that much different from gay men. What does that tell you about the moral status of straight sex and, generally, about straight sex?

Shouldn't, in light of the way straight people who do not really practice monogamous, faithful marriage mean that they are as inelligible for trying to have a moral, committed sexual relationship with a person of the opposite sex? If it's to be used to discredit gay sex, why not?

I don't know how strongly and well Lesbians are at keeping faith to the promises they make, how well they can have a committed, caring sexual relationship with another woman while not violating their obligations accepted when they considered themselves to be Christians. I know of gay men who I believe do both, though I will admit probably not as many as straight people who do. The long legacy of oppression and the relatively few years when it was possible to live in a committed, even avowed marriage is not going to be easily overcome. I think to assert, either by the "sex-positive" promoters of gay sex or anti-LGBTQ nay sayers, that such honest, faithful, committed relationships are not possible for gay men is going to hinder a time when it becomes the norm. At least as much of a norm as it is for other human groups.

And that is concentrating only on one of the general areas of moral corruption that are ubiquitious among ALL PEOPLE REGARDLESS OF THEIR GROUP IDENTITY. I don't think that gay men are any more prone to those venues of sin than heterosexuals are, many of the gay men and even more of the Lesbians I've known are far better at it than some straight folk and many, many of those who are the biggest fattest fans of mandatory chastity for LGBTQ poeple. Look at the right-wing in the Catholic hierarchy, in many of the Protestant denominations, clergy and the religious conservatives in those Christian and many other denominations. I don't think you would be likely to discern the principles of the teachings of Jesus or Paul from the lives of the "religious conservatives". Many of the worst of them are flaming pagans in their own moral observances.

 Well, the problem isn't my computer or the operating system, it's the wi-fi connection, the reason my internet use has been so spotty.  And it's not just me, people around here are having the same problem, so please bear with me. 

I Never Thought I'd Be Writing This Two Hours Ago

IT is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, formerly (I think it's formerly but don't care enough to formally look it up) the official and required theologian of Catholic orthodoxy. I've never warmed up to Aquinas, I have to admit, finding that he was way too wedded to medieval and late classical Latin language theology and thoroughly invested in the misogyny that infects late classical and later Christianity but which I do not find nearly as present in the New Testament and not at all in the recorded words of Jesus in the Gospel. And that's only one of the things about Aquinas that leaves me cold and unconvinced.

I think that today, in 2021, the alleged allegiance to Aquinas is a pretty good indication as to whether someone is a Catholic who is also a Christian and a Catholic who is only one in some imaginary, false anti-Christian pre-Vatican II cult supported by billionaires and millionaires, the modern version of the secular potentates and monarchs who did their best to suppress Christianity, the good news for the poor, the downtrodden, the suffering, neutering the most radical of egalitarian forces, the motive of right-wing "Christianity" Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox today, including much of the clergy and leadership of those bodies and denominations.

In looking around this morning, I found this interesting sermon by Karl Rahner, one of the most prominent theologians of the 20th century. I have read any number of both accusations by right-wingers in the Catholic Church and by those who are eager and ready to move on from the 13th century as re-imagined and codified by the corrupt late Renaissance hierarchy and codified as rigid, official theology when the reaction against the Reformation gave the writings of Aquinas the status they had and may still have, to some extent. Reading it I was struck by how Rahner went past the text of Aquinas's massive Summa Theologica and other writings by pointing out the inadequacy of human theology, without exactly saying that.

"To reflect upon Thomas Aquinas as patron of theological studies does not mean merely to think back on some man in History or on his influence in Western thought. Because we are Christians, we are linked to him; we can actually see him as a fellow Christian in the community of saints. Those Christians who have gone before us into the assembly of saints are not dead; they live. They live in perfection, that is, in the true Reality which is also powerful and present among us today. Some of them we can call by name. These Christian men and women can be more real and more important I or its than theoretical principles or abstract ideas. In many ways they are even more real than we are, for they are with God. They love us; we love theta [them?]. They are present at the eternal liturgy of heaven, and intercede there for its [us?] their brothers.

In comparison to the saints' present existence, their past. history on earth is comparatively of little significance. They now live the quintessence of our life on earth in an eternal form, and the Reality in which they exist is in the last analysis the ground of all reality on earth. They do not belong to the past at all, except insofar as they have lived on earth in past history. Actually they have run ahead, hastened forward into the future, a future waiting for us. To look at a saint., then, is not. to look at something abstract or impersonal, something dead, but rather to sec a concrete person, a unique individual, once alive on earth and now eternally alive, someone who loves and praises, someone who is blessed and redeemed.

There are a number of reasons that this was interesting to me, first had nothing to do with Aquinas but with Rahner who has often been either accused (by the enemies of "modernism") of or, by Rahner's would be supporters, praised for denying the actual existence of the soul, the person after death. If he believed what was attributed to him on that count he could never have written what he did in this sermon. It is one of the most interesting ideas I've read about what the afterlife, of us dying into God, would have to mean, including the meditation worthy passages where I assume there are two serious typos in either the translation or the transcription. The perfection of love that would require us either getting beyond or seeing beyond (as we take earthly reality into account) which is required of us by the Gospel ("Love one another as I have loved you,") but which is only imperfectly possible while we are here, in the body. In line with the piece about how you might meditate on the Lord's Prayer, this matches the prayer that "they will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven," I don't think Jesus would have had us pray for what is impossible, clearly the "new heaven and new Earth" would mean that the Earth we live in is not the one of the future, no matter what N. T. Wright might say about that. If "material reality" means anything it is that the only partially realized vicissitudes which define physical reality can only support what is supported by its limitations and conditions and what is described as an eternal existence is not, under present understanding of physics, sustainable.  I think that part of currently fashionable theology is not sustainable under modern understandings of that anymore than the equality of women and the possibility of LGBTQ people living full and good lives was in 13th century understanding.

But this is supposed to be about Aquinas and the massive work of theology that he produced. Karl Rahner said at the start of his article that he had to consider Aquinas in three areas. He starts by his assumptions about Aquinas that would come from his present sainthood before discussing his life's work in relation to his life's experience.

Three things strike me about one of history's Christians, Thomas Aquinas. (1) He was a friar, a monk; (2) he was a theologian; (3) he was a mystic."

I will leave it to you to read about the brief section on the conditions that surrounded his role as a theologian but it is as a mystic that, as actually turned off by Aquinas's theology as I am, I find something that is reported about him late in life as leading me to respect him. Rahner gives a brief mention of it.

"When we speak of Thomas as a mystic we do not mean that he had frequent ecstasies or visions or that he was a little introverted or overly concerned about his own experiences. There seems to he nothing of this in his writings. Yet Thomas was a mystic. He knew about "the hidden Godhead," Adoro te devote, latens deitas (Devoutly I adore thee, hidden Deity). He knew the hidden God. He spoke of the God who pervades and determines everything in silence. He spoke of a God beyond everything holy theology could say about him. He spoke of the God he loved as inconceivable. And he knew about these things not only from theology but from the experience of his heart. He knew and experienced so much that in the end he substituted silence for theological words. He no longer wrote, and considered all that he had written to be "straw." As he lay dying, he spoke a little about the Canticle of Canticles, that great song of love, and then was silent. He became silent because he wanted to let God alone be heard in lieu of those human words he had spoken for us.

Thomas lives. He may seem far away but he is not in reality, for the community of saints is close. The saints come to us overshadowed by the brilliance of the eternal God into whom they have plummeted through the centuries. But God is not a god of the dead but of the living, and whoever has gone home to him, lives. And so Thomas lives. The question for us is: Does our faith live? For it is through our faith that Thomas can become part of our own life."

It has to stand as one of the rarest of things for an academic, a scholastic, a writer of a huge, major piece of thought that took enormous effort, both in the preparatory study and in the writing, revising, editing (with a friggin' quill pen, not a word processor or even text editor) and final draft, to then declare that his enormous, impressive, life's work is as nothing, mere "straw" something that later hierarchs would ignore as they gave that straw a status which became totalitarian in its potential oppressiveness, the opposite of the freedom which is promised to be a result of knowing the truth, why Catholic right-wingers pretend that they study and take Aquinas dead serious and apply the writings that he more or less repudiated, himself, to modern life, looking in it for means of opposing, for example, the rights of women, prisoners, workers, the poor. I think if Aquinas had any idea of the use his writings would be put to in later centuries I think he wouldn't have started to write it.

So I can think well of Thomas Aquinas but not for the reasons most people would. I disagree with much of what he wrote and I think the use that has been put to has been generally unfortunate. I honor him for that great act of humility, of honesty, of giving up everything he had, what he had created. I think in the end anyone, modern theologians as well as those of the 13th century and the fifth, need to understand that as cool as they want their thinking to be, as removed from corrupting biases and a priori considerations, we are not a party to the perfect knowledge that would be required to do that, everything we think, everything we want, everything we want to be true or feel we must hold to be true is a product of our own minds, our pasts, our own experiences and there is nothing to be done about that. It is as true for the hardest of hard science and mathematics and even more so as we deal with more complex realities than those most reputable of modern idols in our imaginations deal with. 

 

When I got up this morning, I have to say, writing about Thomas Aquinas was nothing I expected to be doing.

I've Been Wondering Who The Most Recent Pictures Of Tubby Bearded Ted Cruz Reminded Me Of, Charles Buono as Batman Villan King Tut

 

News To The National News, Stop Pretending Susan Collins Isn't As Much A Hypocritical Piece of Shit As Lindsay Graham

One thing you have to understand about Maine is that while its Democrats and a large proportion of its independent voters are moderate to liberal, it's Republicans are as benighted and or fascistic as Republicans around the country are.  Any informed, decent Republicans left that foul thinking cess pool before now.  They and the various 3rd party and independent candidates who get easy access to Maine's ballot (I said that Democrats in Maine are moderate to liberal, some of them have been damned stupid in their "reforms") put the proto-Trumpian fascist Paul LePage into the governorship for eight years.  Like Trump kicking Nixon out of the "worst president of all time"out of lowest place, LePage knocked the former Republican Jock McKernan (aka Mr. Olympia Snowe) out of the worst Maine governor in living memory position. 

Maine is the way it is through the past stupidity of 1970s liberals in the legislature thinking it would be groovy to get 3rd  party names on the ballot and the fact that the  broadcast electronic media dominant in the state is solidly establishment Republican,  including the influential public radio network MPBN.   They went all out to get the putrid Susan Collins put back into the Senate this year, the "news" coverage may as well have been written by her campaign.   Maine has long been duped through the media and Susan Collins and, to the same extent, the retired Olympia Snowe doing the least possible to maintain the implausible fable of their "moderate" Republican status.  Of the two Susan Collins was always the more reliable for Republicans and because of that she was always the bigger phony of the two.  

Anyone who expected Susan Collins in what is likely her planned last term as Senator (she originally pledged to Mainers she would not stay more than two terms in the Senate, a promise she was allowed to break with impunity) she will do what Susan always wanted to do and ususally did do, what was good for Susan Collins, her rich DC Lobbyist husband and the Republican-fascist party.  I think Mitt Romeny is more reliably a person of something like principle than Collins who has always been only as honorable as she figured she had to be to maintain the fiction that she peddled to voters in Maine who should have known better by last fall.  

Anyone who thought she would vote for a 15 dollar minimum wage, the rest of Joe Biden's Covid-19 rescue package out of some principle or even shame at having voted for Trump-McConell's billionaire tax-break bill (she said she was as proud of that on "principle" as she was her vote to put Kavanaugh on the court) is an idiot

Susan Collins never did have any character other than self-interest, she is a typical Maine Republican who is selfish and stingy and as hollowly sanctimonious as Chuck Grassley.   She is a fraud, she always has been as I've been telling Mainers for more than three decades.   There's nothing surprising in her proving what a piece of shit she is.

Joe Biden and Senate Democrats may, to some extent, win over Lisa Murkowski or Mitt Romeny, maybe even Ben Sass, but they should forget about Susan Collins who is dependable only the extent to which she figures there's something in it for her.   I would say that her blatant opposition to help that the working poor of Maine need while proclaiming her pride in giving hundreds of billions to billionaires means that she is freed from her plans to not seek another term in five years and she can be as awful as she was about 95% of the time.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Vivienne Harvey - Dammage

 

Following a series of suspicious deaths in the homeless community, DCI Stone decides the only way to the truth is to go undercover on the streets.i

DCI John Stone...Hugo Speer 

DI Mike Tanner...Craig Cheetham 

DS Sue Kelly...Deborah McAndrew 

Jolene...Angela Lonsdale 

Carol...Angela Lonsdale 

Frances...Angela Lonsdale

 McAffrey...Conrad Nelson 

Rigger...Conrad Nelson 

Mad Dog...Reece Noi 

Jammy...Drew Cain 

Queenie...Verity Henry 

Nurse...Verity Henry 

Directed by Nadia Molinari. 

Boy, did I have to wade through a pile of low grad sci-fi, fantasy,  sword and dragons and the allegedly "surreal" before going back to this tried and true cop series. 

Elite Criminal Credentialing

Reading around the news, online, I just came to this headline from Law.Com, from the New York Law Journal

Biden Would Be First Lawyer-President Without a JD From the ‘T-14′ in a Century

 

I didn't know what the "T-14" is though I could tell that much of that list could be guessed and it was probably a safe bet that they would not be public law schools which graduate a large number of those from the lower economic classes. Doing a word search I found this succinct definition from Thought.Co

 

Fourteen law schools have consistently remained at the top of the U.S. News & World Report rankings since the rankings began in 1987, earning them the title of top 14 schools. Although rankings among the T14 may shift slightly from year to year, these schools have historically been ranked among the best, and many graduates have the best opportunities to obtain high-paying jobs nationwide.

First on the list is Yale which produced this year's most eminently expellable, hopefully indictable Senator not named Cruz, the putrid fascistic Josh Hawley.  Third is Harvard Law School which produced the most expellable seditionist, hopefully indictable, senator not named Hawley, Ted Cruz. I could compile a long list of sleazebags, even just those in and around the Trump crime spree and the seditionist plots to keep him in power who got their credentials at the "T-14". Granted I could also make a list that wouldn't be as embarrassing to those over-rated schools for the servants of Mammon. Probably some who will work in the Biden administration, though, as can be seen, not Joe Biden, himself.

The hegemony of the Ivys and the Ivy-equivalents is one of the things that must be broken. There is something deeply anti-democratic in having that entrenched, privileged, mutually-supportive old-school network as a permanent fixture in our governance. I have not started looking at who credentialed the people in the Biden administration yet but I hope there are far more people who either came from a pubic-school, land-grant university background or who don't hold degrees but came up in the ranks on pure competence and dedication to public service. Among our greatest public servants is Abraham Lincoln who was looked down on for his lack of elite credentialing, not even the equivalent of a jr. high level.  Among our worse are graduates from some of the most reputable universities in the world.  And those schools should never be able to sweep their credentialing and enabling of them and their networks under the carpet.

On The Republicans And Those Those Who Should Leave That Ship Of Criminally Insane Fools

Finding out that the Georgia Republican-fascist, gun-fetishist, QAnidiot congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green had once started then sold a CrossFit gym added explanation as to how she operates. Having profited from one psychotic, dangerous cult it's no surprise that she'd be on the lookout for others that might serve the same purpose of it. CrossFit is insane and dangerous and its suck . . . uh, "devotees' as superstitiously irrational as snake handlers and strichnine drinkers and anti-maskers and Trump true believers.  I mean, they figure the dangerous practice of exercising until you vomit is something to be proud of and an accomplishment, something that kills people.  They have a puking clown logo as part of their paraphernalia.

 

I would expect that she'll jump on something else, now that Qanon is falling apart. I don't know if those worrywarts who are afraid that depriving them of larger venues of social media like Twitter and Facebook will funnel them into more overt and dangerous white supremacist criminal online cults but the one they were in was dangerous enough to be going on with. Perhaps a percentage, maybe a large percentage, of those who drank the KKKool-Aid  might be deprogrammed but it's inevitable that a large percentage, especially those who rose to the top of that poisonous punch bowl will keep on with it. I remember someone grasping on to Lindsay Graham's immediate post insurrection deviation from his devotion to kissing Trump's ass as yet another of his shifts but that little piece of crap is too far into it to abandon it. 

 

I suspect that Mitt Romney and a few of the other Republicans are looking for a way to leverage the backlash against the crimes of the Trumpians to reassert the traditional business-first control of the Republican Party but I suspect they're about 26 years too late for that.  They'd do a lot better by leaving the party and forming a center-right independent caucus in the Senate. They'd get up to no good but their no good is nowhere near as bad as the no-good of Mitch McConnell and the white supremacist domination of the Republican Party.

On The Importance Of Being Experienced

Listening to Dr. Fauci on a pirated video of Rachel Maddow's interview with him, listening to him discussing the two-day old administration of the Covid-19 crisis and the implied comparison with Trump and the crooks year long botch, the rule of a spoiled 74 year old man child who the "adults in the room" couldn't make up for, it's clear that it's the difference of day and night when one of those adults in the room is the President of the United States.

People are marveling at the speed with which Joe Biden and his team are moving to fix things, to move things ahead to which I say, look at this list of recent presidents and consider a. their experience in DC politics and b. their devotion to the common good as opposed to private greed. Obama, Bush II, Bill Clinton, Bush I, Ronald Reagan Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford (maybe I should have included something about intelligence) Nixon, Lyndon Johnson (the man who moved democracy farther along than even FDR). Notice something in that list? Which two of those had a long period of a. experience in the governance of the country, b. devotion to the common good as opposed to private greed. 

 

Among the idiotic ideas that became common on the left, as it did on the right that what was needed in the federal government was "outsiders" an idea which I may have once believed but stopped believing as I saw how the media and the corrupt part of Washington DC chewed up and spat out Jimmy Carter, probably the most decent men ever to have held that office,  someone who in decency Biden is already beginning to remind me of.  Carter and the people he brought with him from Georgia were no match for the gangsters of DC.  Too many Democrats still bought the dumb idea that someone whose previous experience didn't include long time service in the Congress would be preferable to someone whose service was in state government and that got us the intellectually brilliant but unprepared Bill Clinton and the minimally DC experienced Barack Obama - who along with Carter may be two of the smartest men who have ever been president but who, at least in the case of Obama,had the bare minimum of experience in federal politics and it showed, badly.

The Trump regime should have killed, once and for all time that whopper of a lie that rich people loved to hear and to say, that what the country needed was a businessman as president. We had one and he almost destroyed the country, he may well if the Senate does not convict him and legal courts follow suit. The culture of business executives is not what you need in the presidency, if the Supreme Court was not constantly in the hands of Ivy League servants of money, MONEY WOULD BE REDUCED TO THE BARE MINIMUM IN OUR ELECTORAL POLITICS. If there are two things that I hope are kept from now on from this terrible plague year it is 1. a virtual political convention, 2. a virtual inaguration THAT CAN BE A SHARED EXPERIENCE FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. Keeping the kind of corruption that raising money for the traditional forms of those and other aspects of politics out of politics is a vitally important thing.

It is so important to our politics that a third thing I hope is kept and expanded and made universal and typical it is voting on paper ballots through the U.S. Mail. It is one thing I hope and pray the Democrats do while they have control, that the repair the attack on the US Postal Service done by Republicans at the behest of private corporations. I want the Postal Service restored and its funding made strong and secure enough that maybe people will use it in preference to the corporations that tried to have it destroyed.

I also hope Louis DeJoy and his helpers are investigated, prosecuted and imprisoned for using an attack on the Postal Sevice to rig the election for Trump.

After Four Long Years Of Knowing We're Paying People To Tell What Are Transparently Lies.

IT seems so novel, listening to the daily press briefing from White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki to have a half an hour of NO LIES, NO HYPE, NO CRIMES. Jen Psaki is a star just because she is doing her job.

I Hope Kamala Harris Gets Amanda Gorman To Write Hers Too

Got into a discussion with someone about why I hope reincarnation isn't real, mostly because I never, ever, ever want to have to go through being a teenager again.   

Then the discussion went to the wonderful Amanda Gorman and her wonderful inauguration day poem which I hope is the beginning of a long and great career as a poet.  I was very glad to see that her books are flying off the shelves.  Let's hope for even greater work from her.

We discussed Obama's second inaugural poet Richard Blanco (Maine's got a piece of him, he lives here, sometimes).  And Clinton's first, Maya Angelou.   I said that I liked what I recalled of those poems,  I'll have to go back and read Elizabeth Alexanders and Miller Williams, that I didn't remember them might have had something to do with me not watching all of Obama's first or Clinton's second inaugurations.  I was mad at Clinton before his second and was too nervous for Obama's first one to watch most of it.

I had to admit that I detest the original  inaugural poem, which wasn't written for the inauguration, Robert Frost's The Gift Outright, a poem that pretty much ignores that the United States is based on land stolen from people the Europeans Frost says were given it murdered to get it.   NOT a big Frost fan. And my view of the Kennedy administration is pretty much changed from how I originally saw it.

We tried to remember if Trump had an inaugural poet and decided that he'd think it was too sissy to have one, making do with his Stephen Miller written manifesto  that should have started an A for Achtung!  

Thinking afterwards I had a kind of creepy feeling that reincarnation might be real and that it had a kind of nasty sense of irony, reincarnating Goebbels as Stephen Miller.

I'm Beginning To Feel Like Celebrating The Last Days Of Christmas Since The First Ones Were So Fraught

THERE IS NOTHING IN POLITICS MORE RADICAL THAN MAKING ANY PROGRESS, PASSING IT INTO LAW, IMPLEMENTING IT, MAKING IT REAL.  

THERE IS NOTHING MORE RADICAL THAN DOING THINGS IN REALITY INSTEAD OF THEORIZING FANTASY TO MAKE THE LIVES OF PEOPLE, LIVING BEINGS, THE ENTIRE ENVIRONMENT BETTER, SAFER, MORE SUSTAINABLE AND PREPARING TO PASS THAT ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION.

This Biden Administration has the capacity to move things on in those directions, I believe that is what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to do, I think that is what those they are appointing want to do. 

The corporate media and the Republicans won't give Joe Biden and Kamala Harris any kind of honeymoon period,  I think the American left owes them a four year long one and their full support BECAUSE IF THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PAST FIFTY YEARS OF AMERICAN POLITICS SHOWS ONE THING IT IS THAT THE ONLY VEHICLE THAT IS GOING TO DO THAT IS A DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION IN POWER.  

I hope and pray that with the Biden presidency his support of the appointment of Jamie Harrison as the head of the Democratic National Committee,  the legacy of Bill Clinton  and the DLC is at an end.  We have to move on from him.   Obama got us part way there, I think Joe Biden can do it.  With Bernie Sanders at the head of the Senate Budget Committee, I think things might change in the right direction. 

I was an ardent and complete supporter of Elizabeth Warrens Candidacy a year ago, I think she would have been a great president but what would have been is not the same as what can be.  One of the biggest lessons for me this past year is that there are other people in the great and diverse Democratic coalition who, while they may love Warren as much as I do, understood that she would not win against Trumpism.  I had been all in on supporting Hillary Clinton even as I was afraid that the garbage bags of lies told about her and, frankly, the problem of Bill Clinton might doom her candidacy. Bill Clinton's grotesquely stupid and irresponsible tarmac meeting with the Attorney General is probably the pivot point which lost her the Electoral College even as she won the popular vote.  I think she paid a huge price and the country a bigger one.  If I bring that up it is because I'll never not be mad about that anymore than I will James Comey and the New York Times sandbagging her to put Trump in office.  

I think more than leaving Trump behind is the promise of the last two days, and by saying that I don't mean not prosecuting Trump, his crime family, his criminal gang and the huge cast of goons and creeps who were the persona scumitae of the past five years.  I hope any time someone puts it to Joe Biden to interfere with the actions of the Department of Justice or prosecutors in New York, possibly Georgia, possibly other places that he should say he is not going to allow law enforcement under him to be corrupted by political pressure.   We've had that for four years and I hope among those considered for prosecution are Barr, Sessions, Rosenstein, Whitaker, and the rest of the gangster lawyer-liars who served the most criminal regime in our history.   Particularly Barr, of course, but the others should be disbarred and behind bars.  The lawyers who that could be said of is a long, long list.  And in saying that the various bar associations that don't throw out criminals like them, the candidates to be Donald Trump's new Roy Cohn should be investigated for being a corrupting force in the administration of law.  The contrast between the bravery of those who forthrightly and clearly and honestly exposed criminality and those who cowered short of calling what was right their in front of them what it was often hinged on whether or not they were lawyers or not.  

One of the unexpected things that happened yesterday at noontime - I wanted to know the exact second that Donald Trump was no longer president* - was that I felt an irresistible urge to fall asleep. As soon as I knew that gang of criminals  were no longer in charge and protected a tension that I'd come accustomed to for the past four years let up.   For me the most perfect of moments yesterday was seeing Kamala Harris presiding over the Senate and laughing about the weirdness of reading the description of her resignation from the Senate.  Knowing that Mitch McConnell won't be presiding over the Senate, at least for a while, may have been the highest point for me and that is thanks to the great Stacy Abrams, miracle worker and to the People of Georgia who turned out.  I hope that high turnout elections become the norm along with such things as virtual - I pray far less corrupt - conventions and inaugurations.   

Maybe The Only Good Thing About The Pandemic And Insurrection Is No Parade, No Balls, Those Would Only Detract From A Rare Perfect Moment

I am absolutely thrilled that there will not be a friggin' parade as part of Joe Biden's inauguration, I'm even more thrilled that they're not having the half-dozen or more balls and lots of the other crap that should never have become part of our civil ceremonial life.  Who the hell needs all that traditional crap after last night? 

Last night was absolutely the most meaningful thing I've ever seen in relation to inaugurations and I remember back to Kennedy's sixty years ago.  It was one of those rare things that was absolutely perfect, beautiful, simple, understated and for that reason classier than classy.  Anyone who was expecting Joe Biden's administration to be a pale imitation of Obama's or some gaff guaranteed comedy of errors should consider again.   

I think the gaffs were a product of a number of things, the anxiety of someone who has a speech impediment and the knowledge that the corporate media would use that against him, the anxiety I mentioned this morning from having to navigate the mine field of unknowable IEDs Democrats can depend on being there, real and those invented out of nothing.  I think Biden knows that after this he will not need to run another election campaign, he's free of that, he's done with it.  This is the last office he will hold, he can do his job without having to worry about his reelection.  He won't be anxious about being indicted, unlike Trump he doesn't have to wonder which day or hour or minute the papers will be served, the warrant will be issued, the summons to appear with be delivered.  

I'm far more impressed with Biden's nominees than I was with either Obama's or Clinton's  even if the feeling of relief at even a minimal exhibition of competence after the the era of criminal insanity and malfeasance were not our shared experience,  Biden's long experience in the Congress, as Vice President, have given him a far stronger knowledge of things than Barack Obama had.  Raw intellectual brilliance, which both Obama and Clinton had is good but it's not going to match decades of experience on the job.  

I'll be nervous for the next four years but only because I'll be afraid that something will happen to stop Biden from doing the job he intends to do. For the past four years I've been afraid that Trump would do what he intended to and for whatever criminally cruel and insane and merely stupid thing he and his ship of fools and garbage scow of criminals would do. 

Jinxes Superstitions And The Curse Of Lies Misnamed Liberty

You don't have to tell me that my habit of thinking I'm going to jinx things by hoping for them or expressing confidence that they'll happen is a silly superstition, I know it. Doesn't mean I'm going to take chances that I'm wrong about that. Not about something as important as what I hope happens the second noon Eastern Standard Time starts and continues through a Biden, then a Harris administration, with good and capable Democrats in control of the Congress. It's too important to take a chance I'm wrong about the jinx thing.

I've been very critical of Biden at many points in his career, though I had thought he was a promising candidate for president when he was young and perhaps callow. I think a lot of the stuff he said and did that I as afraid of was the necessity of a Democrat navigating their way around the lies and attacks that the media would throw in their way to scuttle their attempts at gaining power to do the good that the oligarchs want to prevent. That has been something you can thank the Supreme Court and its freedom to lie they granted to the media, a totally uncivil liberty that the corporate media and the play left have used mostly to destroy the promising career of Democrats who could win elections and do good. That is a habit which I have every confidence that the corporate media and the pseudo-non-profit media such as NPR and PBS will take up almost immediately. I have no doubt that Republican-fascists are planning on sandbagging the Biden-Harris administration as they will Democrats in the Congress and on the State and local levels, even as the insurrection of January 6th fades in the memory and the gaping wounds that our second As Seen on TV president inflicted on the nation and on the world scab over.

You mark my word, until the media, and you have to include the disease of "social media" in that, until they are all made accountable for lies they tell and lies they allegedly passively carry, you can count on a Trump and far worse and not in some distant future. It took eight short years from the disaster of the Bush II regime, a regime I will remind you was inflicted on us through the Electoral College as worked by Jeb Bush, the sleazy Florida Secretary of State and some media work by a Bush family cousin on FOX, it took eight short years for the media to bring us with lies told about Hillary Clinton to Trump. It took two short years for them and the billionaire astro-turf "tea party" to kneecap the Obama administration, throwing control of the House to the odious John Boehner (then the even worse Paul Ryan) and the Senate to the vile Mitch McConnell. 

 

The liberty, privilege, really, to lie that the Supreme Court gave to the mass media is a curse which secular materialism has cast on the United States, we will not have equality THE ONLY REAL AND SAFE GUARANTEE OF DEMOCRACY until that privilege to lie with impunity is removed and media is held responsible and punished for lies it actively tells and those it allegedly passively carries on the basis of "it's being said".  The most recent campaign of the "it's being said" form of lies is in the Republicans excusing their attempt on January 6th at a larger, more vulgar form of the Brooks Bros. Putsch that brought in Bush II there is an unprecidented lack of confidence in the Presidential election of 2020.  THAT THEY DON'T ADMIT THAT THEY ARE THE ONES WHO LIED A LARGE NUMBER OF REPUBLICANS INTO BELIEVING THAT THE ELECTION WAS CROOKED IS JUST A PART OF THE LIE THEY ARE SELLING, I have every confidence that the media will try to sell that lie for them.

The role that lies, especially lies created and sold through the same methods that advertising has perfected played in the disaster of the past four years should be fully recognized.  Lies in the style of successful con-men, what Trump always has been, lies which you can see all night and all day on TV, hear on the radio, see on the internet are what got us Trump.  Democracy has no chance as they get better at it.

I listened to Al Franken the other day talking with the two lawyers Joyce Vance and Prett Bhrara.  At one point the politician and show business guy AND ALL TOO BRIEFLY GREAT SENATOR talked about the necessity of doing something about the flood of lies that washed in the sewage of Trump.   He gets it, though I don't think in developed enough form.   The two lawyers seemed to be horrified at the thought that something might, no, must be done to stop the lies that will bring us here again.   That is something that is like a superstition in the legal profession, that because of a once novel interpretation of the woefully badly written Bill of Rights nothing is to be done even at the cost of democracy, even at the cost of basic decency and the distinction between the truth and lies.   That superstition that started in people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis and William O. Douglas is far stupider and far, far more dangerous than my harmless fear of jinxes.  Free speech-press absolutism of even the degree that controls the thinking of our legal system is of demonstrable danger.  All you have to do is listen to how they talk about the truth that lies got us to Trump and the insurrection of the 6th but then they can't comprehend that the way out of that is by stopping the media from lying.

While Holding My Breath, Crossing My Fingers, Throwing Salt Over My Shoulder and Not Tempting Fate

Garden of American Heroes?  Sounds very Mussolini-American to me.  I missed that particular atrocity of Trumpian imagination.  Really of some numb nutz in his entourage, like Trump ever heard of most of the people on "his" list.  I mean, what are the odds that Trump ever heard of Hannah Arendt>? And I doubt the person who made up the list has much of a real knowledge of the people on it, Red Cloud and Tecumseh  is on the same list with a number of genocidalists, Davvy Crockett, for example.  I wonder what the unreconstructed Calvinist Johnathan Edwards and the post-Christian Ralph Waldo Emerson would make of each other.

 I suppose We The People are supposed to pay for the creepy statues of his hodgepodge of "heroes".  I'm opposed to that, I don't like this monument building mania that followed on the popularity of Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial which, which was hardly built when some of the boys, apparently furious with a girl coming up with an understated and thought provoking design with an attempt to  defaced it with a more traditional war sculpture.  After Lin objected to placing it at the apex of her design a reportedly far better placement for the statue was found that allowed both of them to maintain their artistic integrity.  

Following on,though, was a monsoon of memorials, some of which was about as inoffensive and anodyne as public stuff like that is, much of it was dreadful.  Trump, ever eager to have his name on things, certainly preferably things he could get other peoples' money to build, wanted something that might get his name slapped on it.

I looked at the list, one of the big things that jumped out at me is  Theodor Seuss Geisel, one of those dear old commies who I'm sure would have hated Trump and everything he was. Maybe he's on the list because Green Eggs and Ham is the one and only book Trump ever managed to finish. 

 

I hope this is something that never happens. It's gross.